Caledonian, it’s possible to care deeply about choices that were made in a seemingly-arbitrary way. For example, a college graduate who takes a job in one of eight cities where he got job offers, might within the year care deeply about that city’s baseball team. But if he had taken a different job it would be a completely different baseball team.
You might care about the result of arbitrary choices. I don’t say you necessarily will.
It sounds like you’re saying it’s wrong to care about morals unless they’re somehow provably correct? I’m not sure I get your objection. I want to point out that usually when we have a war, most of the people in each country choose sides based on which country they are in. Less than 50% of americans chose to oppose the current iraq fiasco before it happened. Imagine that russia had invaded iraq with the same pretexts we used, all of which would have worked as well for russia as well as they did for us. Russians had more reason than us to fear iraqi nukes, they didn’t want iraq supporting chechen terrorists, they thought Saddam was bad man, etc. imagine the hell we would have raised about it.… But I contend that well over a hundred million americans supported the war for no better reason that they were born in america and so they supported invasions by the US military.
Whether or not there’s some higher or plausible morality that says we should not choose our morals at random, still the fact is that most of us do choose our morals at random.
Caledonian, it’s possible to care deeply about choices that were made in a seemingly-arbitrary way. For example, a college graduate who takes a job in one of eight cities where he got job offers, might within the year care deeply about that city’s baseball team. But if he had taken a different job it would be a completely different baseball team.
You might care about the result of arbitrary choices. I don’t say you necessarily will.
It sounds like you’re saying it’s wrong to care about morals unless they’re somehow provably correct? I’m not sure I get your objection. I want to point out that usually when we have a war, most of the people in each country choose sides based on which country they are in. Less than 50% of americans chose to oppose the current iraq fiasco before it happened. Imagine that russia had invaded iraq with the same pretexts we used, all of which would have worked as well for russia as well as they did for us. Russians had more reason than us to fear iraqi nukes, they didn’t want iraq supporting chechen terrorists, they thought Saddam was bad man, etc. imagine the hell we would have raised about it.… But I contend that well over a hundred million americans supported the war for no better reason that they were born in america and so they supported invasions by the US military.
Whether or not there’s some higher or plausible morality that says we should not choose our morals at random, still the fact is that most of us do choose our morals at random.